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24 Higher productivity of labor depends, firstly, on the improvement of the educational and cultural state of the masses of the population. This improvement is now taking place with unusual swiftness, but is not perceived by those who are blinded by the bourgeois routine and are unable to comprehend what a longing for light and initiative is now pervading the masses of the people, thanks to the Soviet organizations. Secondly, economic improvement depends on higher discipline of the toilers, on higher skill, efficiency and intensity of labor and its better organization.

In this respect our situation is especially bad and even hopeless—if we should take the word of those who are frightened by the bourgeoisie or who are paid to serve it. These people do not understand that there has never been nor can ever be a revolution in which the adherents of the old regime have not wailed about disorganization, anarchy, etc. It is natural that among the masses who have just overthrown an incredibly barbarous oppression, there is profound and widespread unrest and ferment, that the development of a new basis of labor discipline is a very long process; that before the landowners and the bourgeoisie had been overcome, such development could not even begin.

But without being affected by this, often false, despair which is spread by the bourgoisie and the bourgeois intellectuals (who have given up hope of retaining their old privileges), we should by no means conceal any manifest evils. On the contrary, we will expose them and we will improve the Soviet methods of combating them, for the success of Socialism is inconceivable without the victory of proletarian conscious discipline over the instinctive petty bourgeois anarchy, the real guaranty of a possible restoration of Kerenskyism and Kornilovism.

The most conscious vanguard of the Russian proletariat has already turned to the problem of increasing labor discipline. For instance, the central committee of the Metallurgical Union and the Central Council of the Trade Unions have begun work on respective measures and drafts of